Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

“Aha!” yelped Bat. “No! Because if you think he’s matching weapons to targets that carefully, then he’s not experiencing trolling phase, is he? He’s not walking around looking for juicy kills. He’s aiming specifically at specific people. So no!” He pulled a face at Scarly. “Wrong!”

“Oh,” commented Tallow. “You’re on board with our idea now, then.”

“Yes. No. Yes. What? Fuck you.”

Scarly cracked up.

“‘Fuck you, John, ’” Tallow gently said.

Bat put his hands up, laughing. “All right, all right, John. So he’s not a serial killer, and he’s not in totem phase, and we need to work out exactly what his deal is regardless of whether I win twenty bucks or not. You win. Can I have another drink?”

“Sure.” John stood up and pulled twenty dollars from his wallet. Scarly yanked the two tens out of his grip hard enough to leave the ghost of a friction burn on his fingertips.

“I’ll go,” she said, getting up. “What do you want?”

“Better get me two of those energy drinks they keep in the fridge with the bottled beers.”

“Done.” She took off at a clip.

“She’s really married?” Tallow said to Bat.

“Yeah. Talia’s like this Scandinavian Amazon who can break rocks with her boobs. She could fit Scarly in her armpit. Sometimes I think she likes Scarly just because she was the most portable lesbian available.”

“So her wife could kill her. So she plays away from home. Well, that makes sense.”

Bat smiled. “Scarly just wants the phone number. She’ll leave it in a prominent place at home. Talia will see it. Talia will go in sane . I mean, anger, screaming, tears, smashing stuff up, the works. And then she will fuck the shit out of Scarly for twelve to twenty-four hours. She’ll fuck Scarly until she can’t walk, ice water in the face if she passes out, punching, kicking, choking, you name it. Like a wolf pissing on its territory, right? Only with more strap-ons. Scarly will come into work afterward—and it’s funny how it always seems to happen when she’s got a day off booked—she’ll come in looking like she’s been dipped in crystal meth and tossed to a Canadian hockey team. Which was what she wanted. Which was what the whole thing was about. It’s the one thing about Talia she can control, and she loves it.”

Tallow thought about this for a few seconds, and then raised the last of his beer. “To the secrets behind a happy marriage in New York City.”

Bat cackled and tapped Tallow’s glass with his.

THE HUNTER moved down the block and curled up in the doorway of a small, abandoned retail unit that had previously been a Christian bookstore. Its weathered signage and faded, skewed window posters pleased him. He felt like he was sheltering in the lee of the corpse of some strange dead animal that had made its way to the island from foreign climes and died before reproducing or polluting the ground.

Content, he drew his knees up to his chest and let the modern world collapse back into Mannahatta. The buildings on the other side of the street tumbled away as if gently shoved by heaven’s giant hand, re-forming into the foothills and slopes of shore-side Old Manhattan. Stands of broad pignut hickory arose from the inclines, their catkins unfurling. If he looked closer, with concentration, he could see the long tears in the hickory trees’ bark where black bears had eaten, and detect the scent of rich dark sap where it bled from the exposed wood. Allegheny hawkweed sprang from around their trunks like scattered flakes of amber. The hunter closed his eyes, listening to the calls of ring-billed gulls. He was close to the water here. A short walk would have brought him to the permanent, ever-growing piles of shucked oyster shells on the narrow beach where the catch was always best.

There was the rasp of starved panic grass in the breeze that he always somehow found so soothing. He could close his eyes for an hour. There was time to kill.

When the hunter awoke, the cement under him was chill and damp, and ghosts from the hated future leered at him through cloudy store-window glass. He stood, flexed to pop the stiffness from his spine, and looked up at the sky. He could judge his position and the hour even from the miserly, bare starscape afforded him in modern Manhattan. There was plenty of time for him to make the journey to his night’s last destination.

He started walking, slipping a hand into his bag for his travel notebook. The walk would take him some two and a half hours. He could have done it in less than two hours quite easily, save for the slow emergence of security cameras in the city. The hunter preferred not to be seen. His travel notebook was filled with maps he’d drawn himself indicating the locations of CCTV machines and their estimated fields of vision. The operation of the notebook would have been arcane to anyone else, of course. And that, too, was intended. The hunter’s intent was always to leave no trace on the island. Save for the bodies of his prey. In the unlikely, unlucky event that he was killed in the process of the hunt, there was nothing on his body that would mean anything to anyone. And his only regret in death would be that he would not be correctly buried. There would be no food left by his body to fortify his spirit in its walk across the Milky Way to heaven. There would be no one to cry his name, and indeed no one to close his or her lips in mourning and never speak it again. That, he reflected, wasn’t so bad. No one knew his name to speak it while he was alive now. His name could not die with him because it was already dead, and, in a way, so was he.

It was said that the spirit stayed close to the corpse for eleven days after death. Perhaps he might find a way to kill people even while disembodied. It was a thought that brought a thin smile to his lips as he walked.

He grubbed around in his bag as he progressed past Grand on his way down the Bowery, walking in the glow from the electric showrooms of the many lighting stores fringing the street. He had a few pieces of dried squirrel meat in there, wrapped in plastic and cloth. The hunter, working by touch alone, claimed a small piece and reclosed the wrapping. He bit a morsel off and chewed, slowly and methodically, matching action to footfall. The flavor was somewhere between chicken thigh and rabbit. There was better squirrel to be had farther up the island; the animals in Central Park inevitably took in enough pollution to render their meat blander, and sometimes more bitter, than it really should have been. But it kept him moving, and it kept the saliva flowing, so that he avoided thirst and didn’t deplete his physical reserves.

A little under two hours later, the hunter entered Central Park by Fifth Avenue and East Sixty-First.

He continued moving north. Up by the Seventy-Third Street parallel, paths became dark tangles wending around nighted looming woodland. This was the Ramble. The hunter took one last reckoning by the sparse stars above, gripped the knife in his bag once again, and glided into a stand of American sycamores.

Here and there, he caught glances from men standing alone or in pairs who kept to the edges of the paths, occasionally drifting mothlike to the trail lampposts. The hunter had no issue with the men, whom, more than twenty years ago, he had learned should be called two-spirits. There had been a two-spirit of the Crow Nation whom the hunter admired, a man whose true name translated as “Finds Them and Kills Them.”

When they met the hunter’s eyes, they turned away. He was not here for them. When they met his eyes, they were glad he was not.

Orbiting a great mountain of a Kentucky coffee tree, the hunter saw the one he had come to the Ramble for. The timing was quite exact. Not a tall man, but stocky, giving a sense of size and solidity even without great height. A man who looked like he worked with his hands, and with weights. Military boots that struck the hunter, mired as he now was in the modern day, as somewhat science-fictional. A black running suit, the hunter supposed, though the fabric and cut more suggested stealth fatigues. The jacket unzipped to show a blazingly clean white T-shirt. Thick dark hair that could have been a grown-out Marine cut. Walking with a soldier’s bearing. Walking a dog. An absurd, white fluffy dog that stood less than two feet high. It put the hunter in mind of a wolf that had been crossbred in a laboratory with a cuddly toy.